I don't have a lot to offer about comedian Marty Allen, who died a few hours ago in a Las Vegas rehab center.  He was 95 and had been suffering from complications related to pneumonia.

But I have that photo of me with him and I thought I oughta run it again and say that I always found the guy funny — not witty, not incisive, not innovative…just funny. In fact, he was funny with some of the worst material anyone ever took onto a stage. I think that's a compliment.

This obit and others online will give you the details of his life but I'll give you the quick summary. After Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis became the hottest act in show business and for many years after, every outta-work handsome male singer tried pairing up with some outta-work goofy comedian or vice-versa.

There were thousands of those teams and there were some comedians who tried hooking up with fifty different singers, just as there were singers who tried working with fifty different comics. If you leave aside Rowan and Martin — who didn't fit the singer/comedian role model — the only Martin/Lewis successors who ever had any real success was the duo of Marty Allen and Steve Rossi. Why did they make a go of it where so many others had failed? Well, it sure wasn't because of Steve Rossi.

Marty was just one of those guys who loved performing so much that no matter what he did on stage, you couldn't dislike him. During the few minutes I spent with him before and after the above photo, he was happier to meet the people who wanted his autograph and/or photo than they were to meet him…and most of them were pretty happy. And he made every one of us laugh.

Allen and Rossi both wound up where old acts go to die — in Las Vegas, occasionally reteaming to create an "event" that nobody thought was much of one. I wrote about seeing them individually and together over in this post after Mr. Rossi died. Pretty much everything I have to say about either man is in that post…

…except for this: Right now, some cartoonist somewhere is drawing Rossi in Heaven wearing an angel suit complete with halo, standing there with a look of delighted surprise as Marty Allen (also in an angel suit) enters through them Pearly Gates saying, "Hello Dere!" If they really are meeting up there, it's about their seventeenth — and last — reunion.

As you may know, I have been the co-maker of Groo the Wanderer comic books, along with my best buddy Sergio Aragonés, for several decades now. So you can probably believe me when I tell you the following facts about the two drawings of Groo seen above…

1. They are (or were) for sale on eBay from a seller with many sales to his or her name and 100% Positive Feedback.
2. They were put up as "Original authentic" drawings by Sergio Aragonés.
3. They are absolute, total forgeries not done by Sergio but done instead by a very poor forger.
4. The seller has other sketches allegedly by other artists for sale and says he or she does not accept returns.

The Groo drawing on the left is listed as selling for its minimum bid of $149.  The one on the right is currently offered for a minimum bid of $149 with, as of this writing, no takers.

In the past when I've seen stuff like this, I've written to the sellers and politely informed them that they're selling fakes.  Often, that makes the offering disappear, at least for a while.  Sometimes, I get back a note that says something like, "Oh, thanks.  I didn't know.  I'll look into it."  I am unconvinced any of these sellers were innocent dupes.  What they didn't know was that someone with some authority could notice.  At best, this probably doesn't mean they won't sell the phony drawing.  They just might not sell it on eBay where I can see.

Take a look at those drawings.  If you're the kind of person who might someday like an original Sergio drawing and you can't tell that those aren't original Sergio drawings, perhaps you shouldn't buy an original Sergio drawing from anyone but Sergio.

From "Volare" comes this easily-answered question…

In comic books, I keep hearing the term "splash page."  Just what is a "splash page?"

It's one of those terms that has been corrupted from its original meaning and now has a fuzzy definition. The original meaning dates back to the days when comics were sold exclusively on newsstands and publishers believed that folks browsing those racks made their purchasing selections based on if a story premise or situation grabbed them.

Mort Weisinger, who was the editor of the Superman titles, was considered the master of putting some intriguing scene on the cover which would cause browsers to say, "Wow! I've got to buy this so I can read it and find out what happens!" But the practice pre-dated him.

It was also usually applied to the first panel of any story. They would show some interesting moment from later in the tale as a kind of flash-forward teaser, again to snare the person standing at the newsrack, flipping through the comics before deciding which one to buy. The actual story would then start in Panel 2.

If the first panel was one of these flash-forward teasers, it would be referred to as a Splash Panel. Sometimes, it would be a panel that took up two-thirds (or thereabouts) of the first page. Sometimes, especially on a longer story, it would be a full-page panel. If it was a full-page panel, it would sometimes be called a Splash Page. The idea, I guess, was that you were opening the story by making a big splash.

Over the years, stories in comics got longer and it became rarer to see Splash Panels that weren't full pages…so the term was used less and less. Also, more and more comics began to start the story with that first, full-page scene. This was a trend that Marvel popularized in the sixties, along with longer and even continued stories.

One of the "whose idea was this?" issues where Stan Lee and Jack Kirby concurred was that it was Jack's idea to start stories on page one instead of flashing-forward to preview an interesting scene from later in the narrative. Jack felt that any creative person should be able to come up with an interesting way to start a story without resorting to that and, in effect, wasting a page. Jack also had a lot to do with the practice of having a full-page panel (or even a double-spread) in the middle of a story. People began to refer to any full-page panel, even one in continuity, as a Splash Page.

So what that term once meant was a panel that previewed a scene from later in the story. And what it now refers to is any a full-page panel, regardless of content. Original art dealers also have had a lot to do with changing the meaning because "Splash Page" sounds more important (and therefore, desired) than "full-page panel."

If I were running the Food Network or the Cooking Channel or anything like that, I would give these two people their own show in a minute…

My longtime friend Paul Levitz continues the discussion about freelancers who do or do not get their work in on time.  Paul spent many, many years of his life at DC Comics dealing with that problem and more than once, I was in the office when he had to cope with this age-old problem: A writer or artist had not delivered work when it was due and was running so late that it was creating major problems.

Some were of the human variety. Somebody was sick. Someone was in an accident. Someone's close relative had died. Someone's power was out for two days. There are a thousand excuses, many of them even true.

When comics are done on an assembly line basis, each person has to wait for the person before to complete their assigned function.  If the work is passed from writer to pencil artist to letterer to inker and then to colorist, anyone's tardiness may screw up those who follow.  The pencil artist, for example, can be sitting there waiting for the script, not earning a living because he has nothing to draw.  That not only costs him or her money, it means he or she will have to rush and perhaps work insane hours to get the book back on schedule so the letterer will have something to letter, the inker will have something to ink, etc.

And some of the problems were of the business variety because the book was contracted to be at the printers by a certain date to be printed so it could be in stores by a certain date to be sold.

An editor or other person in Paul's position learns how to budget time, to build pad into the schedule, to know who will probably be late and so forth…to have a Plan B for the inevitable times when the assembly line just plain grinds to an unanticipated halt.  On several occasions, I watched Paul cope with those halts, sometimes even shifting to Plan C or even D. He may not remember telling me this but once, on a book where one member of the team was famously irresponsible, Paul had a Plan E ready to go.

I've seen others deal with them and dealt with them myself.  Paul was very good at that kind of crisis management and he just sent me this e-mail…

Another reoccurring cause of deadline trouble that I've observed over the years: many freelancers tend to time their ability to deliver off their best speed, the occasion when they could turn something around the fastest. Of course, our best speeds are usually a combination of factors that don't always arrive in conjunction: lack of distraction in our personal lives, our sympathy for the material we're working on, the requirements of the project itself, and, oh yeah, our health and mood. But there was the time I wrote a really good full issue script in one day, so of course I can do that again…maybe some day.

On the other hand, there are guys like Jim Aparo, who would do one page a day, pencilled, inked and lettered, so reliably that he'd sign a contract for 214 pages a year, and deliver them like clockwork. (Not even talking about the one man factories like Jack Kirby…)

Editors treasured a guy like Aparo and I had folks I worked with who were also utterly reliable. I doubt any artist ever had a better track record for delivery-on-time than Dan Spiegle and like Aparo, it wasn't just that the work was there when it was supposed to be. It was there and it was very, very good. That matters, too. A topic for another time is how a high percentage of the best writers and artists in the forties through the seventies were also very fast and very reliable.

And I'm not suggesting that writers and artists of the eighties and beyond have not been fast and/or reliable but the job description has changed somewhat. I can't find the actual e-mail right now but I remember it pretty well. A year or two ago, a top artist wrote me and said…

What is it with editors who don't get that I'm not drawing when I'm not home at my drawing board? I agreed to do all the art for this graphic novel in four months and I'd have no trouble meeting the deadline but every week, they call me to ask if I can fly to some other city and do a bookstore signing for my last project for the company. Or he calls and says, "We really need you at this convention in Toronto next month." I told him fine if we change the deadline because I won't be doing the work when I'm at the con and he actually asked me, "Can't you draw pages on the plane? Or in your hotel room?" I turned down the con so I could get the job in on time and now I'm hearing that I'm not a good team player!!!!!

I remember that pretty well including the five exclamation points. There actually are artists who can set up in a hotel room and get work done and I've seen Sergio working in both pencil and ink on airplanes…but some can't and it shouldn't be expected of anyone.

Anyway, Paul's right. A couple times in my career, I've written 20-24 pages in a single day but I can't always do that. Or at least, I can't always do that and also be pleased with what's on those pages. If I expected to be able to produce at that pace every time, I'd have been late with a lot more assignments and the quality of most would have been much lower.

Then again, if I'd been late with a lot more assignments and the quality of most had been much lower, I wouldn't have gotten as many assignments. So maybe some of this problem is self-correcting…

I write a lot of obits on this site. Some are about people I didn't know very well.  Ten years ago today, I had to write one about someone I knew well and liked a lot.  I still miss Steve Gerber and so does the comic book industry even if some who work in the field don't know it…or him.

I don't think I ever told you how I met Steve.  I knew him first through his published stories which I thought were some of the best coming out of Marvel at the time.  From a writer's standpoint, there are two kinds of comics you find yourself writing for a company like DC or Marvel.  One is the kind where you're handling characters created by others, working in a mythology established by others.  Some writers do some wonderful work in this arena but when I think about my favorite comic book writers, I'm more impressed with their work in the other kind of comic book.

That would be the kind that you either create the comic or co-create the comic…or you take over a book about which very little has been established.  Generally speaking, you have to be the only person writing those characters at the time.  That gives you more freedom to shape the environment of that book and to add new characters or reshape existing ones such that you can tell the kinds of stories you have to tell.  You make it your own, at least for the time you do that book, which generally has to be a long period.  It never happens when you're doing an issue or three.  You have to stay on a book for a while before you can form-fit it to your strengths.

Steve did that when he took over a comic called Man-Thing, making it distinctly his own for a while.  He did it of course with Howard the Duck and a few other comics he launched.  He wrote some good stories for ongoing comics handled by many like The Defenders and  Sub-Mariner but he found his voice in the more personal books.  In them, he wrote more about human beings even if those human beings were monsters or ducks.

Anyway, I liked his writing but before I met him, when I mentioned his name to anyone at Marvel, I was told he was crazy…and I don't mean brilliantly, eccentrically crazy.  I mean "crazy" the way Charles Manson was crazy.  Several people, including a writer or two who I guess thought of him as competition, told me that any day, Steve Gerber would be hauled off to the looney bin.

I didn't necessarily believe them.  I've had too many people in my life turn out to be exact opposite of the way they were described.  But I also didn't not believe what I was being told about this Steve Gerber person.

Now then: For several years in a row, my partner Sergio Aragonés would host an annual post-con party right after what we then called the San Diego Comic-Con and now call Comic-Con International.  The con ended on Sunday afternoon and a lot of us would caravan (or drive home) to Los Angeles and by 8 PM, there'd be a big crowd at Sergio's old home in the Hollywood Hills, sitting around the pool and eating pizza.  Just talking and unwinding.

At one of these parties, I found myself talking to a guy with glasses.  We were discussing comics, the world, life, movies, the pizza we were consuming, everything…and the guy was bright, funny, perceptive and I had no idea who the hell he was.  He somehow knew who I was but if I'd been introduced to him, I hadn't caught the name.  And after 40 minutes or so of great, enjoyable conversation, I didn't feel like I could say, "By the way, who are you?"  I was trying to figure it out without doing that.

I forget which comics he mentioned he'd worked on but let's say one of them was Daredevil.  He'd say, "You know, when I was writing Daredevil…" and I'd start thinking, "Okay, who wrote Daredevil besides all the people I know who wrote Daredevil?"  And then I'd think, "Well, I believe Steve Gerber wrote a few issues but this person is way too sane to be Steve Gerber."  He'd mention some other comic that several people had written and I'd think, "Gee, the only person I can think of who wrote that comic and who I don't know is Steve Gerber.  Could this possibly be Steve Gerber?  Naw…"

Finally, he mentioned writing Howard the Duck and I thought, "This is Steve Gerber!"  And I instantly realized that not only was he not demented or insane but he was saner and smarter than any of the people who'd told me Steve Gerber was out of his mind.  He was also a better writer than any of them.

We spent a lot of time together.  When I was running the Hanna-Barbera comic division, I brought Steve in as my assistant and he also wrote a lot of the comics, most of which were published overseas.  Later, I recommended him for animation writing for the Ruby-Spears studio and he quickly became one of their most valuable writers and story editors.  He wrote for many of their shows and developed Thundarr the Barbarian.

Often, you bond with people by charging into battle alongside them.  Steve had his infamous legal battle against Marvel over Howard the Duck and a lot of folks (not just me) joined that battle in whatever way we could.  But Steve also fought a lot of fights to better working conditions and compensation for all writers, not just himself.  If and when an accurate history is ever written of how life in comics got better for creative people in the eighties, Steve's name will be mentioned a lot.  That's what I meant about how the industry misses him.

I do, too.   He was a clever, creative guy and we all out missed out on the wonderful things he might have written if he'd been around the last ten years.   A great, great loss.

When Steve died, I seized control of his blog and it's still up and running at www.stevegerber.com.  Not a lot has been posted since and as I write this, the most recent post and comments are from October of '16.  But every message Steve posted is still there, followed by many posted since we lost him.  You might want to drop by and read and maybe even write something.

Julien Neel — who all by himself is one of my favorite singing groups — favors us with a song from 1927…

This piece I wrote about a freelance artist who fibbed and gave me a huge deadline problem continues to draw mail. This is from Steven Marsh…

I've been a professional magazine editor for nearly 18 years, and your column about Mr. "No Problemo" darn-near gave me an anxiety attack just to read and experience second-hand. So, once again, your writing has provoked an emotional response from me!

My question is: Do you have any insight into WHY an artist (or other creative) would DO something like that? Is it hubris? Delusion? A vain attempt to FORCE the creativity to come? What's the best-possible outcome they can envision?

Yeah, I can explain it because after I forgave the guy and began giving him work again, we discussed it. The artist was a freelancer who worked for many companies and editors. I absolutely sympathize with anyone in that position because that's been my entire career for 49 years now — juggling assignments, working for several places at the same time.

By his own admission, this artist worried incessantly about not having enough work to meet the expenses of life. Even when he had a full dance card and was turning down work, he was fretting, "What if there's nothing more after I hand in my current assignments?" When I asked him to draw the story for me, he should have said no, he didn't have time. He was already committed to too many other jobs but on impulse, he said yes. Remember that I had just become an editor for the Hanna-Barbera comic book division. He wanted to establish himself with me because I was a new source of work for him.

He also wanted to get a lot of work from that division. We paid a little better than others and we paid faster than anyone else. With everyone else he worked for, it took a week or two to get the check. If I received the work before 2 PM, the check would go in the mail that day or if you brought the pages to me before 2, you could hang around for fifteen minutes and I'd get the accounting department to issue the check then and there. Also, the artist liked me and wanted to work with me.

He thought he was doing both of us a favor by taking on the job…and he thought he'd have more time than I said. When most editors say "I need this in two weeks," the freelancer assumes he can fudge it by a week or two; that there's padding built into the schedule. I told him there wasn't but as he explained to me later, "I always assume there's more time than the editor says because there almost always is."

I probably erred by not saying something like, "And I honestly just have to have it in two weeks. Please don't take it on if you can't get it done in two. I'll offer you some other work soon but I truly need this one in two weeks."

So he took it on and then one of his other employers made some threatening noises and he felt he had to do an assignment he had from that guy before he tackled mine and…well, everyone has limits. He simply mismanaged his time and mis-estimated how long everything would take him to do…so he couldn't get everything done when he said he'd get it done. This happens. His real crime was in not being straight with me as to how the work was proceedings. He apologized, I decided he was sincere and we put it behind us.

This reminds me of a story about Betty White that I don't think I've told here. I'll try to write it up in the next few days.

There have been a lot of great dancers in movies but nobody danced better than the Nicholas Brothers…

This news story has my favorite headline of the week…

• 90% of Libertarians and Independents I meet are Democrats or Republicans who are too embarrassed to identify with the party they'd gladly belong to if it did what it was supposed to do.

I have often mentioned my friend Paul Harris on this blog. Paul has been hosting radio programs on a regular basis for four decades, most recently on KTRS in St. Louis. Today, he does his final regular show there. That doesn't mean listeners somewhere won't hear him again. You can take the boy out of radio, etc. He may do fill-ins and guest hostings. But he no longer has his own program and he can now devote all his time to his favorite pastime — losing every cent he ever made in radio at a poker table.

No, actually, he seems to be pretty good at winning at cards, though I think I could take him in a high-stakes game of Old Maid. He is also really, really good at radio. When folks ask me for pointers on interviewing — something I often do at comic book conventions — I tell them to go to Paul's website and listen to how he asks questions. He is well-informed on his guests. He knows what kind of interesting stories and discourses they may have. He asks pointed questions that give the guest a good starting point for a reply. (First sign of a bad interviewer: Too many questions that include the phrase, "What was that like?")

Most of all, he senses how much of any given interview should consist of him talking and how much should be the guest. There are people paid millions of dollars a year to host TV talk shows who could stand to learn this. I am about one-tenth as good at interviewing as Paul but it would be more like one-thirtieth if I hadn't learned from his examples.

His last show today is on KTRS from 3 PM to 6 PM Central Time. You can listen on iTunes or at the KTRS website. I have great confidence though this will not be his last show. It better not be.

Alvin and the Chipmunks sing for Jell-O…

Record producer Quincy Jones is spreading gossip and celebrity secrets all across the 'net. People are writing to ask me, "How much of this should we believe?" My answer is "As much as you want to believe." People have a tendency to try and separate everyone into Truth-Tellers or Liars and I don't think anyone falls wholly into one of those categories. There are also people who sincerely believe things that aren't so…or tell stories that are more speculation than first-hand knowledge. I dunno how much of what Quincy Jones is spilling is true but a pretty safe answer would be that some of it is and some of it isn't. Since most of it is stuff I don't really care about, that answer works for me.

Are you following the Rob Porter Scandal? If you're watching Fox News, probably not since it's gotten almost no mention there. But he is the now-former staff secretary who resigned Wednesday after two ex-wives accused him of abusing and beating them. That's pretty awful but it gets worse when you realize how many people in our government knew about it and did nothing. In fact, a lot of them defended him and praised him and called his accusers "character assassins" or worse, right up until the moment that it became obvious that Porter's guilt could no longer be denied. Then suddenly we got a lot of "I didn't know about this" and faux sympathy for his victims. Dahlia Lithwick has more.